Last week, I read this remarkable story about a new cruise ship by Oli Franklin-Wallis in Wired, and have been thinking about it ever since:

Symphony of the Seas – which, on its maiden voyage from Barcelona in March 2018 became the largest passenger ship ever built – is about five times the size of the Titanic. At 362 metres long, you could balance it on its stern and its bow would tower over all but two of Europe’s tallest skyscrapers. Owned and operated by Miami-based cruise line Royal Caribbean, it can carry nearly 9,000 people and contains more than 40 restaurants and bars; 23 pools, jacuzzis and water slides; two West End-sized theatres; an ice rink; a surf simulator; two climbing walls; a zip line; a fairground carousel; a mini-golf course; a ten-storey fun slide; laser tag; a spa; a gym; a casino; plus dozens more shopping and entertainment opportunities.

Cruise ships mean two things to me.

Earlier this year, I went on a ‘mini-cruise’ from Newcastle to Amsterdam aboard a DFDS ship. The journey was an overnight 15 hour or so thing, so certainly not equivalent in any way to spending weeks at sea on the world’s biggest cruise ship. The rationale for this was that I fancied a last-minute break and couldn’t find a cheap flight from Newcastle, so went on a cheap boat instead, spent a day in Amsterdam, and took a cheap flight from there. This worked remarkably well, and I’d do it again.

This was the first time I’d been on an overnight boat since our annual family camping trips to France when I was a child. Prior to going, I’d sort of thought in the back of my mind that I might be the sort of person who might one day enjoy a proper cruise. This experience put me off.

The ship was lovely, and I was particularly impressed by the cabin. I had expected a pokey bunk-bedded hovel but was actually rewarded with a fairly large space which looked not unlike a Travelodge room, with an en-suite bathroom. The food on board was also much higher quality than I would have expected. But I am somebody who likes to wander—and even with only 15 hours on the ship, I was itching to get off and explore. Exploring the ship felt a bit constrained.

It was silly of me not to realise this in the first place. Wendy and I ruled out going to an idyllic holiday resort last summer for the sole reason that it was located on a main road along which walking was not advised, so we couldn’t ‘go for a wander’ without catching a bus or taxi somewhere first. I hadn’t really clocked that ‘going for a wander’ wasn’t really a go-er on a ship.

While the Symphony of the Seas is ridiculously bigger than the ship I was on (it’s more than twice as long and can take four times as many passengers across twice as many decks), I still think I’d feel ‘cooped up’ pretty quickly. So I don’t think I’ll be going cruising anytime soon.

My other relationship with ships is professional. One of the more esoteric parts of my role as a Consultant in Health Protection is that I am the designated Medical Officer for a number of ports. This gives me certain legal responsibilities relating to ships and the health of their crew—most of which are thankfully delegated to people much more expert than me. But just imagine how complex an outbreak of norovirus or Legionnaire’s disease could get on a ship as huge as Symphony of the Seas. I was fascinated to read in Oli’s article about some of the steps taken to mitigate the risks:

“The level of hygiene is extreme,” Yrjovuori announced, as we passed a hand-washing station. Though ship-wide outbreaks of sickness make the news at least once a year, the total number of passengers who fall ill is a fraction of one per cent. But close quarters enable outbreaks, so sanitation regulations at sea are stringent. Every part of the ship, from lift buttons to the casino’s chips, are sanitised daily; interior materials have to stand up to the high level of chlorination from the constant cleaning. Rubbish is frozen in vast storage containers to slow bacteria growth and is only removed in port.

Fascinating stuff… perhaps we could even try and replicate some of it on land!

The pictures in this post are my own from the above-described ‘mini-cruise’ adventure. The pictures in the Wired article are a great advert for the power of print, looking far more arresting as double-page spreads than as on-screen images.

When people who otherwise know me and Wendy very well come round to our house, they not infrequently express surprise at newspapers lying around the place. But, whatever others might think, both Wendy and I like a print newspaper. For both of us, the serendipity of newsprint is inspiring: we often find our views challenged by a newspaper presenting something that we hadn’t previously considered, or highlighting an alternative angle on something we thought we knew. This is the newspaper playing the role of an anti-Facebook: not presenting us with stuff we are likely to like, but instead presenting us with stuff which is well outside our field of knowledge and experience.

On top of this, there happens to be a large overlap in the Venn diagram of good journalists and journalists employed by print news organisations. So as well as reading print newspapers, I also subscribe to a number of digital versions of newspapers from the UK and the USA, often to follow specific journalists. There are some journalists whose byline on an article means it’s worth reading, even if it’s about something I would never normally be interested in: Will Storr is an example. There are some journalists who are so expert and well-connected in their field that their byline means an article will provide new insight into a topic: Tim Shipman is an example. There are some journalists who understand the value of explaining the significance of a story, don’t cry wolf, and aren’t afraid to explain that the frontpage splash is really not a big deal in the grand scheme of things: Matt Chorley is an example. And, at the other end of the spectrum, one quickly gets to know the bylines to avoid, the journalists who will almost certainly have failed to understand the material they are covered, whose work will almost inevitably contain at least one major error of fact: it seems rude to give an example.

Another advantage of traditional print is that it is slow. Breaking news frequently demands our attention but is rarely worthy of it. The implications of news are rarely understood at the moment it breaks, not least as so little is generally known. Speculation is often worse than unhelpful, separating fact from fiction is rarely possible in the moment, and vacuous commentary often precedes facts. Farhad Manjoo’s article for the New York Times this week discussed relying solely on print newspapers for news and was particularly clear on this. Delayed Gratification is even better than newspapers for this: it presents news on a three-month delay, allowing much fuller analysis and discussion than anyone could hope to achieve in the first three minutes.

Of course, both me and Wendy also regularly read news online and on our phones. We don’t exclusively read newspapers. But I think, for both of us, they form an important part of our news ‘diet’.

I was set thinking about all of this after seeing a data story by Kirby Swales in April’s Prospect. Swales’s suggestion is that the BBC News website has essentially cannibalised the tabloid newspaper market (perhaps the reason the BBC feels it necessary to write full articles on a reality star’s Instagram post and ‘listicles’ about Twitter storms). To me, the biggest surprise in that data is that less than half the adult population of the UK regularly reads news online.

I don’t really have a point to make in this post. I suppose I’m just musing without conclusion that I like newspapers, their circulation is falling, and with ever-more news available online, the proportion of people engaging with it is really quite small. Maybe society is disengaging from journalism. Or maybe habits are changing in less dramatic ways. I don’t know.

The picture at the top is from Jeff Eaton on Flickr and is used here under Creative Commons licence.

I’ve mentioned Mozart in the Jungle on here before. It’s a wonderful Amazon Prime comedy-drama about passion, professionalism and music. Inspired by Blair Tindall’s autobiography of the same name, the show follows both the appointment of a new conductor to the New York Symphony Orchestra and the travails of a young oboist trying to break into the orchestral big league.

It stars Gael García Bernal and Lola Kirke who both give performances of a lifetime alongside an all-star ensemble. It is creative and imaginative to the point of being a bit nuts sometimes. What other show would have Lang Lang on as a guest star and feature his piano performance with the sound replaced by Daft Punk? And yet, this made for one of the most memorable scenes in four seasons. And the third season featured the most beautiful cinematography of Venice I have ever seen. And, of course, the whole series features fantastic orchestration spanning all kinds of music.

Mozart in the Jungle is a completely brilliant show. And yet, Amazon has decided to cancel it. I really hope someone else picks it up.

I’m writing this in the courtyard of Television Centre in West London, which I happened to be passing today. I’m gazing up at the newly restored statue of Helios and watching the repaired fountains dance as they never have on any previous visit.

I think for most British people of my age, Television Centre is the home of Going Live, Live & Kicking, Blue Peter, Ed the Duck, Otis the Aardvark, and Philip Schofield and Andi Peters’s broom cupboard. After the BBC moved off the site in 2013, it has been closed for restoration and redevelopment, with luxury apartments the order of the day—albeit with three television studios remaining. It seems ironic that two-thirds of the studios in a location so closely associated with the BBC are to become the new standing home of iconic ITV programmes like This Morning any day now.

I last visited Television Centre with Wendy, a few months before it closed.

We were lucky enough to secure a place on one of the final tours of the building and were fascinated to get an understanding of the mechanics of production of TV shows (and especially news programmes). This aspect was far more interesting to both of us than the celebrity anecdotes, tour of the Match of the Day set, or inevitable visit to the gift shop.

We both felt a little uncomfortable at the tour of the ‘celebrity’ dressing rooms, knowing that they were the settings for sexual abuse: our visit coincided with a 12-month period in which horrific historical examples of abuse at the BBC were being recalled almost daily on the front pages of newspapers. The fabric of the building was also falling apart at the seams, the sense of magic ebbing away with the physical as much as the moral dilapidation.

Towards the end of the tour, we were press-ganged into making up the numbers for the studio audience of a recording of a truly terrible daytime game show which we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of since. In a high-pressured time-limited trivia finale, the host fluffed the reading of almost every question. He then got to record ‘pick-ups’, having a second (and occasionally third) go at reading them correctly. The contestant didn’t get a second go at answering them, and so presumably ended up appearing inexplicably flummoxed by perfectly simple questions, through no fault of her own. “TV magic”, it seems, still favours the “talent”.

This afternoon, Television Centre is quiet. In fact, as I tap away, I’m the only person in the courtyard. At least from the outside, the restoration appears sympathetic. The front of the site looks all the better for the landscaping that has replaced the exterior car park, which also has the effect of making the Centre seem smaller and more intimate.

I expected to feel a certain sense of melancholy from coming to a place to which I once felt such a close connection, knowing that a part of our collective cultural heritage had been auctioned off to the highest bidder and converted into apartments I could never hope to afford. And yet, that is not how I feel.

Perhaps incongruously, I feel a strange sense of satisfaction at seeing the building sympathetically restored. The impression is of quality and accessible historical grandeur, and it feels strangely as though the hope for the future inherent in redevelopment has frightened away the collected ghosts of the past.

It doesn’t feel like a wonderous “TV factory” any more, as it did from a distance in my childhood; but nor does it feel like a tainted crime scene, as it did on my last visit. It feels like a housing development sympathetically built around a listed building—which is, I suppose, exactly what it is.

Over the past week or so, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have barely been out of the news. The central thrust of the story is that people consented to share information with Facebook and apps hosted on Facebook, which has then been used to target advertisements. It is claimed that these targeted advertisements influenced the US Presidential Election and the UK’s EU membership referendum. Despite frequent uses of phrases like “hack” and “data breach” in the news coverage, none of this actually involved anything other than use of information for which people had given consent—but the consent may not have been truly informed consent, because people simply clicked “Agree” without reading. (This old story, in which users of free wifi universally agreed to hand over their eldest child in exchange for internet access, feels relevant here.)

To anyone interested in technology, nothing in this story is particularly surprising, and I think its fair to characterise most of the tech press as struggling to cover it. Even Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist credited with highlighting this story, reportedly sees herself as a feature writer who translated something well-known among the well-informed into a story with mass appeal, rather than uncovering anything new.

To me, that the adverts on Facebook feeds are not randomly chosen seems self-evident. And yet, there is plenty of evidence that many people don’t even recognise adverts in their Facebook feeds, let alone wonder how they were chosen. The coverage of Cambridge Analytica seems to suggest that many users are agape at the revelation that Facebook adverts exist and are targeted at users. In some quarters, the anger at Facebook is offset by the fact that the service is free to use and “has to make money somehow”.

If I were an investor in Sky, I would be worried right now. Unbeknown, I suspect, to the vast majority of its users, Sky targets TV ads via a platform called AdSmart. Sky boxes download adverts overnight and then play back commercials targeted at households in ad breaks. Or, as they put it,

With Sky AdSmart different ads can be shown to different households watching the same programme.

Sky uses an enormous amount of probabilistic data on subscriber households to enable this targeting, including everything from household income, the age of cars owned by household members, the month of renewal of insurance policies, the pets owned by householders, whether subscribers are pregnant, and even the compass direction in which the householder’s garden faces. Sky promotes this to advertisers as an

in-depth knowledge of Sky households … There are thousands of combinations to choose from when selecting the audience that sees your ad. Households can be selected based on factors such as age, location, life style or even if they have a cat … allowing advertisers to cherry-pick their audiences.

If people don’t expect targeted advertising on a platform where they proactively share much of their life, then I suspect that they are even less expectant of being profiled and targeted with advertising while they are catching up on the latest soaps. While folk post about their cats on Facebook with alarming frequency, I think many people would be upset to learn that Sky knows whether they own a pet, let alone that this knowledge is used to show them relevant TV ads. And, of course, users pay Sky hefty subscription fees each month, negating the “has to make money somehow” mitigation.

Nobody can claim that Sky is anything other than open about AdSmart, and I am quite certain that they will have legally compliant consent from subscribers as part of the terms and conditions of their service. But all of that is also true of targeted advertising on Facebook. To me, AdSmart feels intuitively like a programme ripe for “exposure” through a talented journalist like Carole Cadwalladr. While the press has less of an incentive to attack Sky than it does to attack Facebook, I would be worried if I were Sky.

The picture at the top is based on an original posted on Flickr by Sarah Joy. I’ve modified it and used it here under its Creative Commons licence. The Sky AdSmart picture in the middle is a promotional image owned by Sky Group, used here under the ‘fair dealing’ exception to copyright law.

The Washington Post’s Hayley Tsukayama recently pointed out out that in the latest version of Windows,

if you go through setup as recommended, you’ll never get a password option.

Passwords, we can surely agree, are the bane of modern digital existence. On a big-picture level, insecure passwords cause an estimated 80 percent of breaches, according to a 2017 report from Verizon. On a human level, they’re paralyzing; right when you need to access your utility bill, you can’t remember if you replaced the “a” with a 4 or an @ symbol.

Indeed, we certainly can agree: passwords suck. I seemingly have quite a few more online accounts with passwords than the average person. It’s simply impossible to have unique passwords for all these accounts and have any hope of remembering them. So for many years, I used Lastpass to manage my passwords (though I moved elsewhere after their significant data breach), and turned on two-factor authentication wherever I could. I even used a YubiKey for a bit, until I got fed up with having to fetch my keys to log in to stuff. Despite this, I was still pretty lazy, and typically used the same password (or a simple derivative of it) to sign up for new services, which meant that–despite all advice to the contrary–many of my accounts ended up with the same password.

I thought this was “alright enough” security. I had unique passwords for accounts I saw as “high risk”, such as banks and email accounts, but “so what” if some loyalty card account shared a password with some other account. I didn’t think I cared. Even when I knew that various company’s data breaches had exposed my information, I didn’t think I needed high security on most of my accounts.

Then, in a matter of months, three things happened that changed my mind.

First, somebody used my details to spend a couple of quid on my Greggs app. I don’t actually use the Greggs app very often, so it took me quite a while to notice that my account had been drained of the small change it contained. And I wasn’t all that bothered: I was mostly amused that someone had gone to some effort to steal a small amount of money to spend on pastries. I didn’t even report it, I just closed down the account. (Sidenote: yes, I’m a public health consultant, and yes, I had an account on the Greggs app. Deal with it.)

Second, I noticed that dodgy advertising text had been inserted into a number of posts on my blog. This did irritate me. It turns out that I had both used a frequently repeated password to secure the database that runs the site, and also left this in a publicly accessible place. I’m fairly certain that it was the former rather than the latter that led to the problem. In some cases, the miscreant had also deleted the backups of posts, so I couldn’t do a simple restore to overcome the problem: I had to do it manually. And I still occasionally come across bits of inserted text that I missed when cleaning up.

Third, someone knicked £8 of Costa points from my loyalty card. This also annoyed me–albeit slightly irrationally given that I rarely bother to redeem the points, hence having £8 built up. Again, used a password that I’ve often used elsewhere to secure this account. I did report this, and Costa refunded the points and (so they told me) investigated the fraud.

What’s the point of all this? I suppose I realised that I cared more about many of my accounts than I thought I did. The convenience of using an easy password meant that my security was a bit lax around the edges, and I lost out around those edges. The system of using passwords to secure accounts inappropriately rewards lax behaviour on a day-to-day basis, as it is less hassle than securing things properly.

I’ve since used my password manager properly, changing all of my accounts to long random sequences of numbers, digits and symbols that even I don’t recognise, and got into the habit of generating new secure passwords every time I’m asked to set one up. This takes a very small amount of hassle, but certainly more hassle than a go-to easily remembered reusable password… until the account is breached, of course.

There are still settings where I maintain that a long string of characters as a password is not particularly helpful. For example, I was at a conference at the Royal Society of Medicine the other day where the delegate wifi password was long and complex. Who were they trying to keep out? Why was any password even necessary? But at the same time, it’s becoming clearer to me that lax security is no longer really good enough, even for seemingly insignificant accounts.

It seems to me that ‘password management’ has gone from being something that ‘techy people’ need to think seriously about, to something we all need to think about. And let’s be honest, most of us won’t, at least most of the time. So it’s always good to hear that passwords are being ‘phased out’. The sooner the better, as long as the alternative isn’t too much hassle!

The image at the top is by Christiaan Colen on Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.

There’s a quaint Chinese legend which says that raw eggs can be stood on end at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes—that is, today. I first came across this in season four of The West Wing, in the appropriately named episode Evidence of Things Not Seen.

Most superstitions try to convince people that the impossible can happen under specific circumstances. What I really like about the egg myth is that the exact opposite is true: it’s perfectly possible to balance an egg on its end on any given day of the year (particularly if the egg is first vigorously shaken). The myth is in the restriction to a specific date, not the action itself.

It’s this aspect of the legend that makes me want to revisit it regularly. In life, I think that myths more frequently work this way round. I find that people far more often build up a sense of challenge and foreboding around straightforward tasks than insist that the impossible can be done if only specific circumstances applied—and certainly, I think it’s human nature to think this way when looking ahead to events in our own lives.

The legend is a good reminder that we shouldn’t get distracted by the social mythology that gets built up around stuff, and we shouldn’t give into our own fears about future events. There are enough barriers and hurdles in the world without imagining ones that don’t really exist.

The photo at the top is my own, originally published on 20 March 2012. In retrospect, I should probably have tidied the kitchen table a bit before taking the photo.

An interesting article by Will Jennings and Christopher Wlezien in today’s Times Red Box pointed me in the direction of their recently published paper in Nature Human Behaviour on the accuracy of pre-election polling. Their conclusion, in a nutshell, is that polls are becoming better at accurately predicting the outcome of elections.

This gave me pause for thought: are polls designed and intended to reflect the outcome of an election? Or are polls about reflecting the views of the population at a point in time?

My hunch is that they are more often designed for the latter purpose. Most polls ask how people would vote if there were an election today. I’m not aware of any polls that attempt to correct for the typical post-election “honeymoon” nor the typical midterm “slump” in their efforts to better predict the next election result.

If my hunch is right, then it’s probably unfair to talk about poll “error” when the results of polls conducted well before elections do not match the election results. More importantly, it puts a different spin on their findings.

Assuming all other things are equal (which they are most emphatically not), then late polls better reflecting the outcome of an election suggests that they are better reflecting the views of voters. Assuming that this increased “representativeness” carries across the election cycle and that polls are measurements rather than predictions, then mid-cycle polls more accurately reflecting the final outcome suggests that the population’s views are becoming more intransigent. (In truth, I’ve no idea whether or not this fits their data, it just seems like it might.)

I don’t know whether that is true or not, but it certainly feels like it might be. I feel like things are reaching a point where people are no longer willing to engage with alternative political views, let alone change their own view. On social media, in particular, I see people who didn’t have had a clearly defined political view five years ago now suggesting that those with differing political views necessarily have malintent. This goes for both sides of the political debate. This never seems a particularly good strategy to me – I don’t think many people have their views changed through the hurling of insults!

The picture at the top is by RachelH_ on Flickr, used under Creative Commons licence.

Alongside my main job, for a few hours a year I’m an Associate Lecturer in Public Health at Northumbria University. My biggest single contribution in this role is a full day seminar on health protection, which forms part of the Master of Public Health course. By sheer coincidence, this year’s seminar fell on 15 March—today—and so I “treated” the students to a brief lecture version of this blog post from a couple of years ago. They seemed to like it!

Spring feels like it is just around the corner, with crocuses and daffodils just starting to appear along my route to work. I think the combination of lighter mornings and other signs of spring life do a lot to lift the mood at this time of year! Unfortunately, there is further snow forecast for the coming weekend—really rather unusual for this late in March, and potentially very problematic for sheep farmers with lambing season well underway.